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55: Faces and Heels

June 5, 2026

Setting​

Little Cradle, the trader town at the foot of the Eldoran capital. The party is still posing as Pupusa Possum, a deliberately mediocre mercenary company auditioning for Lord Bradicus's artifact-retrieval contract — a televised death-game the sadist lord intends to film with drones and watch for sport. The whole job runs on a contradiction: win the contest, but never look good enough to draw attention. With a night to kill before the audition, the party decides the cleanest way to come out on top is to make sure everyone else comes out worse. By the time the cars roll up to the Bradicus gates, half the field is too drunk to stand and the party still has to look like the underdogs.

Players Present​

  • Topher (DM)
  • Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer, the invisible hand
  • Luke Neverisky as Leliana Goldspring — Human Bard, undercover as "Lily"
  • Ellis Taylor as Olivia Cooper — Dwarf Paladin, undercover as "Becca Benson"

(Bru sits the session out — Justin away. Scarlet and Agent Finnegan travel with the party as the operation's third and fourth hands.)

Plot Events​

The Plan to Lose Honestly​

The night before the audition, the party works out how to win a contest they're supposed to be bad at. The answer is sabotage. They have a supply of Marvin's brew — "the brown," the same memory-wiping liquor from the Lotus that, in goblin-specific doses, once gave the party the best night they've never been able to recall.

"This led to the best slash least remembered night of our lives." — Silas

Christopher floats a "roofie bomb" — misting the inn's air ducts — but the party rejects it as too indiscriminate. Olivia lands on something quieter and more elegant: spike the continental breakfast. Every crew is going to wander down for coffee and juice in the morning, and a doctored drink raises no alarm. The strategy sharpens from "take out whole teams" to a precision strike — drug only the most dangerous member of each rival crew, dust a few harmless "schmucks" on top to hide the pattern, and leave the field looking like it simply had a rough night.

Leliana is cast as the inside performer: invisible help during the spiking, then a public show of being roofied herself for cover. She wins the role over Bru on a better Performance stat. Finnegan, for the record, gets a quiet endorsement from the table — "She's done more to make an honest man out of me than almost anyone else."

Knowing the Enemy​

The party spends the evening on recon in the inn, reading the competition on a string of sharp Insight checks (~29–30). The field clarifies into a roster of marks:

  • The cats — the pink-and-fluffy mercenary crew. The white one claws hardest and loudest, but the real authority is a gray tabby lounging at the back, running the table without lifting a paw.
  • The rich fops — a pack of operatic gentlemen. The dangerous ones are a curly-mustached baritone in a top hat and a clean-shaven bass in a burgundy suit, the strongest singers of the group.
  • The card players — a western, cowboy-hatted crew. The man in the hat holds roughly 80% of the chips and runs the show; a woman in black sits second. Two drunk, identical twins are no threat at all. A hidden fifth member watches the whole game from a shadowed corner.

While they scout, the party builds out its aliases off a string of inverted Law & Order jokes: Olivia becomes "Becca Benson," Silas becomes "Tristan Hammerfell," Leliana goes by "Lily," and Finnegan stays "Finn." Olivia falls into conversation with the card crew's leader — a soft-spoken man named Paul who insists his people are just farm hands sent by their boss Leonard to check out the Bradicus event, not mercenaries at all.

"Everyone tries to play hard, but people just living their life." — Paul

The "Becca Benson" name immediately starts getting flubbed — "Carl, nice to meet you" — which becomes the night's running gag.

The Continental Breakfast Job​

At morning breakfast, Silas runs the operation solo and invisible — an hour of invisibility that breaks only on an attack or a spell, leaving him free to work the room. Moving table to table on Sleight of Hand checks, he tips Marvin's brew into target after target without a single drink visibly changing:

  • Paul and Jesse, the card-crew leaders — a clean 30, liquid absorbed without a ripple.
  • The cats' saucers of milk — a 24.
  • The rich fops — all five doctored at once on a 19.
  • A spread of random schmucks across the other crews — rolled out on the dice and nudged up with a psychic die to scatter the pattern wide.

Only the biker gang slips the net. The leather-jacketed crew skips the restaurant entirely, gnawing granola bars in their rooms, and Silas can't reach a single one. With the work done, he sprints upstairs, drops invisibility in private, and shuffles back down playing a man who just rolled out of bed — tradecraft with a cover story attached.

By the time the operation resolves, the field is wrecked. Paul and Jesse slump in their chairs, several cats go glassy-eyed, and the entire fop contingent comes apart at the seams — throwing chairs and gold coins until a massive orc bouncer hauls them out the door. Marvin's brew doesn't drop a target instantly; it makes them act blackout-drunk and loopy for hours. Pupusa Possum is the only crew left standing. Leliana, on cue, begins her own performance of being thoroughly roofied.

The Road to the Estate​

The party joins a caravan train up to Eldoran in Finnegan's nondescript sand wagon, the drugged rivals slumped and snoring in the back seats of cars all around them. The capital reveals itself as a city carved into two facing cliffsides and expanded across the top, reachable only by riding an elevator up from the valley floor.

The Bradicus estate is its own marvel built into the rock: a spiral of magnificent stonework behind a huge brick wall that, to Olivia's dwarven eye (Perception 18), clearly burrows down into the earth itself. Silas (Perception 21) catches something stranger — a faint arcane field rising off the manor walls, doming the open air above the grounds. An Arcana check (26) reads it cold: the bubble blocks flight and deflects thrown objects, meaning any bomb lobbed over the wall would simply bounce back. No ramping in, no flying over.

At the gates, each arriving car presents an invitation while its drugged passenger slouches uselessly in back. The party watches one Rolls-Royce-style wagon catch fire, veer off-road, slam an embankment, and explode against the now-visible invisible dome — the screaming fops inside reduced to dust. Finnegan bluffs Pupusa Possum straight through on the strength of Silas's earlier deception groundwork.

"Papoosea Possums at your service."

Inside the Manor​

Past the gate is a castle out of a fever dream of money: granite stonework, trellised wisteria and rose vines climbing hundreds of feet, gold-veined walnut inlaid in every window and door, a chandelier the size of a wagon, an immense spiral staircase, and six humming elevator bays. Butlers circulate with champagne and strawberries, prosciutto and cheese on crackers, and bacon-wrapped jalapeños.

Two adventuring crews are loudly feuding in the middle of the hall — jocks of strength and finesse against nerds of cunning and showmanship, each swearing they'll reach the artifact first. An Insight check (30), confirmed by Leliana's psychic read, exposes the whole thing as theater: the two groups are secretly allied, manufacturing a jocks-versus-nerds rivalry as cover so they can help each other through obstacles and use "crossfire" as an excuse to gut the other teams. Everyone in the room, it turns out, is performing.

Leliana, meanwhile, commits hard to her own performance — the only visibly loopy guest in a room where everyone else left their drugged liabilities out in the cars. She leans on Scarlet, works through an entire tray of crackers, and gets handed a cup of "water" by Olivia that is, in fact, a straight shot of vodka. Scarlet, telepathic and underfed, admits she skipped breakfast entirely, stopped tracking the plan somewhere along the way, and is now starving.

Bradicus Takes the Balcony​

Lord Bradicus appears on a balcony in a long red velvet coat, flanked by two drones — one trained on him, one sweeping the crowd. His speech is a confession dressed as a mission statement: the Bradicus fortune was "bought by the cold metal used to kill thousands of people." His late father Satakus built that weapons empire — the family that armed the great wars and engineered the Golden Empire's rise. Bradicus, as heir, wants to rewrite the family's story: from heroes of the battlefield to heroes who recover the artifacts of the past and push technology forward.

"The name of Bradicus will be known for adventure, wonder, splendor."

Butlers hand out manila packets — the manor's history, a map, and the job. To the northwest lies the ruin of an old music library, out of which a shrine has jettisoned up through the earth, by all signs not built by any human hand. The ruin teems with monsters and paranormal ghosts and is murderously dangerous — but the packet's clearest warning is that the deadliest threats present are the competing adventurers themselves. The goal: be the first to recover the golden harp and return it to become Bradicus's champions. Stapled to the back are five or six pages of liability waivers absolving Bradicus Corporation of any responsibility for death, sickness, missed work, maiming, or dismemberment.

A history check (Nat 20) fills in the politics: Bradicus is an independent state, a genuinely contested matter — "like Hong Kong" to Eldoran, "like the Vatican" to Bradicus itself. Crimes between Eldoran citizens and Bradicus property go to a joint tribunal whose deadlocks produce split decisions that can strand a person in one territory or the other. The party files it away. It will matter.

The Time Starts Now​

Bradicus drops the flag.

"The time starts now."

Initiative is rolled, and the room detonates into the show Bradicus paid for. Leliana's Insight (25) clocks the biker gang — five of them, spared by their granola-bar breakfast — drawing switchblades. She gets ahead of it, casting Color Spray (DC 17): four of the five bikers go blind on the spot, only one covering his eyes in time. As a bonus action she slips Silas some "bar juice" and stumbles theatrically behind the party.

Four of the six crews break for the doors and their cars at once. Silas tries a telekinetic psychic shove to trip the crowd into a bottleneck (spellcasting 13) but only manages to stagger one runner — the doors are simply too large to choke. So he teleports instead, arcing across the hall (Acrobatics 23) and propelling thirty feet to land first through the doorway. Outside, the courtyard has become a brawl: bare-knuckle fights everywhere, including the shirtless woman from the card crew beating a mercenary inside a cheering ring, and a naked, androgynous figure perched atop a burning car, waving its clothes and hooting at the sky.

Silas relays the scene back telepathically and starts toward the goal — only to register why everyone bolted for their cars rather than a door inside. The music library ruin is miles away, out past the road on the map. Nobody is racing to a treasure room down the hall. Everybody is racing to drive there.

The DM calls it for the night mid-scramble, the contest barely underway, Pupusa Possum about to floor it toward an abandoned music library full of ghosts and rivals. To be continued.

Notable Character Moments​

  • Silas's breakfast job is the spine of the session and a masterclass in his whole skill set. An hour of invisibility, a circuit of Sleight of Hand checks topping out at a clean 30, and a field of rival mercenaries crippled without a single visibly altered drink — followed by the cover-story sprint upstairs to "wake up" tired. The party was told to win without looking good. Silas found the version where they win without anyone seeing them do anything at all.

  • Leliana as "Lily, thoroughly roofied" is the session's best piece of acting-within-acting. In a room where every other crew quietly left their drugged members in the parking lot, she's the lone guest performing the affliction — leaning on Scarlet, demolishing a cracker tray, accepting a shot of vodka as "water." Then, the moment the bikers pull blades, the loopy drunk snaps into a pinpoint Color Spray that blinds four of five attackers. The helplessness was the costume.

  • Olivia as "Becca Benson" runs the social front of the operation — designing the breakfast plan, working Paul at the card table, and weathering an entire evening of people forgetting her fake name. She gets the night's quietest power move: handing her "roofied" bandmate a glass of straight vodka to sell the act.

  • Scarlet's confession is a small, perfect aside — the telepath who agreed to help run a precision sabotage operation reveals she skipped breakfast, lost the thread of the plan somewhere along the way, and is mostly preoccupied with being hungry. The party's competence is never quite as total as it performs.

Themes​

  • Everyone is performing: The session is a hall of mirrors of fakery. The party fakes mediocrity to win. Silas fakes a hangover to hide a sabotage. Leliana fakes being drugged to hide that she isn't. Two rival crews fake a feud to hide that they're allies. Bradicus stages a "contest" that's really a filmed bloodsport rebrand. Under it all, Bradicus is faking a legacy — laundering a weapons fortune into a story about wonder and adventure. The faces and heels go all the way down.

  • Winning by sabotage: Told to be worse than they are, the party reframes the whole problem. You don't have to be the best team if you make sure no other team can stand up. The continental breakfast — coffee, juice, a doctored drink no one questions — is the entire campaign's "hold your punches" doctrine turned into a weapon. They never threw a punch. They poured the drinks.

  • A sadist's reality show: Bradicus's audition is entertainment built on death — drones overhead, a dome that turns escaping cars into dust, waivers absolving the house of dismemberment, and a host who wants a spectacle. The party walked in calling it a Squid Game pilot, and the gate that vaporized a carful of screaming fops proved the joke was the literal truth.

Session MVP​

Silas — For turning an impossible brief — win a contest you're forbidden to look good at — into a single hour of invisible work that left half the field too drunk to compete, with no witness, no evidence, and a cover story already in place. The party's whole mission depends on being underestimated. Silas spent the morning making sure that, this time, it was earned.